5.1

Netflix produces massive amounts of rich video content laden with special effects, deep color, and vibrant sound. The quality of that output, however, is dependent on your internet connection. Understandably, the company wants to raise the ceiling on its audio game for its TV users — it's now rolling out a new adaptive technology that will boost Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound to its best levels yet.

HMD Global has unveiled its latest mid-range Nokia-branded handset in India, confirming an earlier leak that suggested similar design language to the Nokia X6 and subsequent X5 released in China. What they have in common is a notched display, 5.8 inches and 19:9 in the case of the 5.1 Plus. There's also an octo-core MediaTek Helio P60 chip, and dual rear cameras on board.

Of course, now that we've posted Getting To Know Android: Lollipop Edition, it's time to get picky and have a look at the things that still need fixing. As always, we'll be running through some of the issues hanging around in the latest iteration of Android, and taking a look at what's been fixed since our last Stock Android Isn't Perfect post.

Fixes and Updates

Lollipop, as I said in the other post, is probably the biggest change Android has ever seen, so some issues from KitKat have simply disappeared, while others have been fixed in their own ways. We'll take a look at what's changed from our last SAIP entry, and then continue on with the new nitpicks as necessary.

Android 5.0 Lollipop (known previously as just L) was the biggest change to Android since Ice Cream Sandwich. Frankly, I’d rank it as the biggest change to Android ever, for a variety of reasons.

Google has ostensibly searched every corner of Android for opportunities to tweak, improve, or completely reimagine the platform, and Lollipop is the result.

The most noticeable change was undoubtedly the addition of material design, the very first time Google has openly, publicly taken on a cohesive and thoughtful design philosophy, making it - in theory - accessible to everyone, and defining its rules clearly. Material design, which I've written about before, is a huge design shift, which can trace its roots all the way back to Matias Duarte's work on Palm's WebOS.

It should come as no surprise that Android is due for a v5.1.1 release at some point, even if only to fix a particularly well-known memory leak. Now, thanks to an SDK update, we've got good reason to anticipate the new version is probably due out in the very near future. If developers check the SDK Manager for updates, they should see a new revision to the Platform SDK with a product description that reads "Android SDK Platform 5.1.1."

Now that the 5.1.1 version number is out there, it stands to reason Google has finalized the code and is either running some final tests or preparing for a release.

If you thought we had run out of details to talk about in Android's latest Lollipop iteration, think again. We'll go into 5.1 in gory detail for Getting to Know Android but in the meantime there are still a couple of little details worth pointing out individually. One of those is a tweak to fast scroll bars.

Fast scroll bars are typically used in lists of alphabetically-organized content, where users might want to quickly scroll to a particular entry or section. In 5.0, the fast scroll bar was an oblong shape sitting on a tiny little wire of a scroll track, but it served its purpose.

In the Android community, Lollipop 5.0 is known for a lot of things. Unfortunately, among those things is a pretty severe memory leak that has plagued users with app crashes and launcher redraws, as device memory filled and failed to clear.

With Lollipop 5.0, most of the Contacts app graduated to a slick new experience inspired by material, but for some reason the contact creation/editing screens clung to old holo paradigms.

The newly tweaked editing layout in Android 5.1 makes a decidedly more thoughtful use of horizontal lines and adheres to material design's standard keylines (at 16 and 72dp) making for a cleaner, clearer interface with helpful iconography highlighting each type of field.

Amazon's Android app has received an update to 5.1 that's all about reducing how much typing you need to do to use the app. We've spotted changes to the search UI that make it possible to perform inquiries using your voice. We've also come across strings hinting that credit card scanning is either already included or on its way.

What's New

When you hit the magnifying glass in the action bar to begin a search, the screen that appears will now contain a microphone for voice searches. Tapping on this will prompt the question: "What are you searching for?" The process saves you a tap, as you no longer need to hit the mic on your keyboard.